The Washington Post reports, “Israeli construction in East Jerusalem adds to difficulties facing negotiators“:
When the Obama administration launches indirect peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as early as this weekend, it faces a much more complicated landscape than the Clinton or Bush administrations did, especially in Jerusalem.
In the decade since Israelis and Palestinians came close to a peace deal in 2000, the complexion of Jerusalem, perhaps the most sensitive of all the sticking points, has been altered. Israeli construction is blurring lines between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods, making any bid to share or divide the city even more difficult than in the past.
A battle for sovereignty and international legitimacy is playing out on every hilltop and valley here. And with tens of thousands of new apartments planned for Jews in East Jerusalem — well beyond the 1,600 announced in March during Vice President Biden’s visit here — the potential for construction derailing the new peace negotiations is high.
I’m sorry but Israel and the Palestinian were not “close” to a peace deal in 2000. Yasser Arafat rejected the deal. But why should the Palestinians be rewarded for rejecting the deal? It the Palestinians can reject any deal as insufficient, why should Israel be obligatred to cede the same territories for “peace?”
For Israel, the issue of Jerusalem is about not just Jews’ historical claims to the city but also demographic realities. Israelis fret about the Jewish majority of the city declining as the Arab birthrate outpaces that of Jews; by some estimates, the Arab population — which today is about 300,000, or 35 percent of the city’s total — could equal the Jewish population by 2030.
The quailfication of “some estimates” indicate that this is as much as wild guess as anything. There’s good reason to be skeptical of the 2030 estimate however Israel Matzav lays out the concern better.
Some of you may have heard about the corruption scandal known as the Holyland Park, a huge luxury apartment complex built on the site of the former Holyland Hotel, which seems to have gotten its zoning permits only because they bribed just about everyone in sight. What you may not realize is that Jerusalem has had almost nothing but ‘luxury apartments’ built for the last 20 years. Those luxury apartments are purchased by people who live abroad, and they sit empty for the entire year except for the weeks of the Pesach and Sukkot holidays. That’s great if you can afford it, but what it means for Israelis is that there are no apartments we can afford, that the shopkeepers in those neighborhoods have little or no business and that the schools in those neighborhoods have few or no students. On a macro level, it’s been devastating to the city. Housing prices have skyrocketed, and young couples are either living in storage rooms converted to apartments or have left the city altogether. That’s why we’re still fighting an uphill battle to keep Jerusalem Jewish.
There have been two new neighborhoods in the last twenty years in which they housing was (originally at least) affordable: Ramat Shlomo and Har Homa. Both were built in the 1990’s. Those 1,600 apartments that were supposed to be built in Ramat Shlomo were 3-bedroom 2-bathroom starter apartments (according to a weekend JPost article that as far as I can tell is not online yet) that would keep young, Jewish couples in the city. Meanwhile, the Arabs continue to build in Jerusalem without any need for permits. The city is no longer enforcing its own building code when it comes to Arab buildings.
So by ignoring Ramat Shlomo, those ‘Jewish leaders’ are greatly increasing the risk that they will wake up one morning to discover that Jerusalem no longer has a Jewish majority.
(emphasis mine)
As this makes clear, the efforts to prevent Jewish building in Jerusalem are efforts to change the Jewish character of the city. Funny, how it is when Israel does something that the Arabs object, Israel is accused of trying to “change the facts on the ground,” but when the Palestinians do, it’s considered unremarkable (unless Jews try to fight it.)
It’s worth making another point about Post’s article. The portrayal of the requirement to share Jerusalem as being essential to peace is predicated on three assumptions 1) that there is a historical Arab claim to Jerusalem 2) that resolution 242 requires Israel to withdraw from all territories it captured in 1967 and 3) that it is workable.
Daniel Pipes has written extensively on the ties between Muslims and Jerusalem. After observing that Jerusalem was not once mentioned in the Koran Pipes observes:
Why did two surveys of American Muslims find Jerusalem their most pressing foreign policy issue?
Because of politics. An historical survey shows that the stature of the city, and the emotions surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims when Jerusalem has political significance. Conversely, when the utility of Jerusalem expires, so does its status and the passions about it. This pattern first emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Since then, it has been repeated on five occasions: in the late seventh century, in the twelfth century Countercrusade, in the thirteenth century Crusades, during the era of British rule (1917-48), and since Israel took the city in 1967. The consistency that emerges in such a long period provides an important perspective on the current confrontation.
Dore Gold recently wrote about the assumptions surrounding 242 are wrong:
After the Six-Day War, the architects of UN Security Council Resolution 242 insisted that the old armistice line had to be replaced with a new border. Thus Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN admitted at the time: “I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where the troops had to stop.” He concluded: “it is not a permanent border.” His U.S. counterpart, Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, added that “historically, there have never been secure or recognized boundaries in the area”; he then added that the armistice lines did not answer that description.
For the British and American ambassadors, at the time, Resolution 242, that they drafted involved creating a completely new boundary that could be described as “secure and recognized,” instead of going back to the lines from which the conflict erupted. President Lyndon Johnson made this very point in September 1968: “It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders.” It is for this reason that Resolution 242 did not call for a full withdrawal from all the territories that Israel captured in the Six Day War; the 1949 Armistice lines were no longer to be a reference point for a future peace process.
Yet in recent years a reverse process has been underway to re-establish the 1949 Armistice line, calling it the 1967 border and sanctifying it as a legitimate international boundary. This is one of the side effects of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which talks about the 1967 lines. The 2003 Road Map introduced a problematic terminology that a peace settlement “ends the occupation that began in 1967.” This was partially offset by the reference to Resolution 242 in the Road Map, as well, with its caveats against a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories and its call for establishing secure
And finally Yaacov Lozowick has looked at other historical efforts to divide cities, and they haven’t worked very well or aren’t really applicable to the Israeli/Palestinian situation. One scenario:
7. Beit Jalla. The peace unravels.
The events of autumn 2000 have seared an irreversible scar on Israeli memory. There are contradictory versions of what really happened, so let’s use the Palestinian narrative. Summer 2000 saw Yasser Arafat heroically resist an Israeli-American attempt to foist unacceptable peace terms on the Palestinians. A few weeks later the talks were renewed, and late in September Arafat visited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at his home; they made a joint phone call to President Clinton to assure him of their commitment to reaching peace. Later that week Ariel Sharon took his walk on the Haram elShariff and all hell broke loose; the El-Aqsa Intifada had begun.
According to this narrative, the violence wasn’t premeditated nor centrally steered. It was the expression of popular anger. Within hours Israeli and Palestinian gunmen were killing each other. By the third day Palestinians were machine-gunning the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo from the nearby town of Beit Jallah.
What if someday, a month or a decade after peace is declared, popular Palestinian frustration again expresses itself in violence? Beit Jallah is a mile from Gilo; Palestinian Abu Tor is – literally – five feet from Jewish Abu Tor. It took the IDF months of military action which included destroying homes in Beit Jallah before the Palestinians desisted from their attacks. Given the terrain in AbuTor, or Beit Safafa and Pat, or Beit Yisrael and Bab el-Zahara – all on the Green Line – the only way to force angry Palestinians to desist from violence would be to conquer the Palestinian part of the city, in brutal house to house combat. Smack in the center of Jerusalem, one of the most sensitive spots on the globe.
There is every reason to expect that this Israeli gesture or that expression will infuriate some Palestinians someday. The leaders may sign a peace document, but the grievances won’t be forgotten, and the refusal to accept the Jews’ fundamental right to a state in their ancestral homeland is axiomatic for the Palestinians. They may grudgingly accept the fact of Israel’s existence, but they will continue to feel it was wrongly foisted upon them; the resulting animosity will not dissipate anytime soon.
While Janine Zacharia, the reporter casts Jewish building in Jerualem as little more than a provocation, the truth is significantly more complicated and not at all guaranteed to bring peace even if Israeli concessions on Jerusalem eventually lead to a signed agreement.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
